(Part 3 here) Welcome to Part 4. I've still been busy with the book and related stuff (Gamasutra bonus chapters, bonus images, documentary), as well as the usual family thing and a lingering illness (a four week "cold" that my wife and I are still suffering with), so I really haven't had the time or energy to get downstairs much to mess with the TRS-80 collection again until last night. Needless to say, even though I only spent about an hour down there, it was very educational. I hope to be able to devote a small block of time each night to making progress and formally blogging with images and/or video when there's something particularly interesting happening.

(Part 2 here) Welcome to Part 3. Instead of doing text and photos here in Part 3 of this TRS-80 slog, I thought I would just shoot a quick (unedited) video tour of the stuff that I moved into the office, which gives a better view of the entirety of that particular part of my collection and what I'll be going through in various forms starting with Part 4. For those that care, I captured this with my Canon PowerShot SD790 IS Digital Elpha camera in its movie mode, which does 640x480, 30FPS, AVI format. Quick and dirty, but a very large file for such a short video (in fact 464.3MB), so it's not really practical for longer format work without conversion, particularly since YouTube only allows maximum 1GB single video files regardless of whether it's HD or SD, like this is. In fact, YouTube again thwarted my attempts to use it (multiple hung uploads), so I went to Viddler.com, which seems to work better with larger uploads, though it degraded the quality considerably. So much for "quick"...

(Part 1 here) Welcome to Part 2. In the interest of keeping these things short and manageable, I'll start with photos of the present location of my TRS-80 Model x series stuff before I move it into the office for easier access and further detail - which will be Part 3 - so I can start doing interesting things with it all (which will be future parts after 3). Let's begin...

In the interest of continuing to organize my all eras videogame and computer collection of 300+ systems and countless software, accessories, add-ons and literature, and learning about them all on the most fundamental level possible, as time permits I am hoping to pull out my complete collection of an individual platform and do all kinds of things with it, including cataloging, photography, videography and most-of-all, using, particularly when it comes to games. I still haven't worked out all the details or how much detail I'll actually go into, but I'm envisioning a series of blog posts as frequently as my time and energy allows. I'm going to pull the bulk of a particular collection off the shelves and into my office, and leave it in there until every item is cataloged and used, where possible. I was going to start small, but in this case I'll be starting big, first with my TRS-80 Model x collection, which represents the TRS-80 Model I, III, 4 and 4p (the II was an unrelated business-centric system that used high capacity 8" disks), of which I own a Model I, 4 and 4p, and just the mostly empty shell of a III. It's a big task, but a helpful one for me and I hope a fun one to read/hear/watch.

Since I'll be using the real hardware, I would LOVE IT if someone were interested in going at it from an emulation standpoint. There are some fine emulators and plenty of available ROMs. It's not the most attractive of systems from an audio-visual standpoint, but it does have some nifty stuff and it was among the "holy trinity" of original "true" personal computers along with the Apple II and Commodore PET.

In the mean-time, here are some helpful links to learn more about the TRS-80 series of computers: